Hot air engine
Ericsson then proceeded to invent independently the caloric, or hot air, engine in the 1820s which used hot air, caloric in the scientific parlance of the day, instead of steam as a working fluid. A similar device had been patented earlier in 1816 by the Reverend Robert Stirling (1790-1878), whose technical priority of invention provides the usual term 'Stirling Engine' for the device. Ericsson's engine was not initially successful due to the differences in combustion temperatures between burning Swedish wood and firing of British coal. In spite of his setbacks, Ericsson was later awarded the Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1862 for his invention.
In 1830, Ericsson patented his second engine, that can work either with steam, air or water. This rotative engine objective is to reduce the engine within more convenient limits without any corresponding loss of power.
By 1833, Capt. Ericsson built his third engine, a hot air engine (or caloric engine) that is exhibited in London: "the engine will prove the most important mechanical invention ever conceived by the human mind, and one that will confer greater benefits on civilized life than any that has ever preceded it" (John O. Sargent). This engine included a regenerator that would inspire many other hot air engine inventors.
The caloric ship, powered by the fourth Ericsson engine was built in 1852.
A group of New York merchants and financiers headed by John B Kitching, Edward Dunham, President of the Corn Exchange Bank, and G.B. Lamar, president of the Bank of the Republic, backed the project and in April, 1852, the keel of the ship was laid at the yard of Perine, Patterson, and Stack in Williamsburgh. At about the same time the construction of the engine was commenced by Messrs Hogg and Delamater.
Hull and machinery were built in the greatest possible secrecy, both Ericsson and his financial backers being convinced that their ship would revolutionize ocean transport by its economy and safety, and that competitors would if possible copy the design of at least the engine.
On September 15, 1852, the ship was launched and in November the engine was turned over at the dock under its own power. It would be a failure.
Smaller experimental engines based on the same patent design and built before the caloric ship, however would prove to be working efficiently.
In his later years, the caloric engine would render Ericsson comfortably wealthy, as its boilerless design made it a much safer and more practical means of power for small industry than steam engines. Ericsson's incorporation of a 'regenerator' heat sink for his engine made it tremendously fuel-efficient. Apparently in the post Civil War era some time before or around 1882, from the publishing date, a ship was purchased by a Captain Charles L. Dingley called the Ericsson with a weight of 1,645 tons that was built by John Ericsson (Although the above section on John Ericsson's Friendship with Cornelius H. DeLamater says that the ship known as the Ericsson was built by the DeLamater Iron Works) to try out the hot air engine as a motive power in open ocean navigation.
Decades later, in 1883 John Ericsson built a solar air engine of 1 HP. The leading feature of the sun motor is that of concentrating the radiant heat by means of a rectangular trough having a curved bottom lined on the inside with polished plates, so arranged that they reflect the sun's rays toward a cylindrical heater placed longitudinally above the trough.
This heater, it is scarcely necessary to state, contains the acting medium, steam or air, employed to transfer the solar energy to the motor; the transfer being effected by means of cylinders provided' with pistons and valves resembling those of motive engines of the ordinary type. Practical engineers, as well as scientists, have demonstrated that solar energy cannot be rendered available for producing motive power, in consequence of the feebleness of solar radiation.
